Word Clouds

I was experimenting with Wordle last night. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight created two word clouds based on Gallup's health care survey. Gallup provided the verbatim responses and Silver snagged those to create his Wordle clouds so I thought I would too. It's very addicting and I soon found that several hours had passed. The top one is the against reform responses and the bottom one is the for reform responses. Each image definitely tells a different story...



I thought I could do another based on Constitution. What evolved shows a document that is heavily weighted for the States. If you have not played with Wordle it creates a graphic illustration of text by giving weight to words that appear most often. Articles and common words are deleted like A, The, An, And... It's a pretty interesting tool to play with and explore.

Christian Nation

Did the "Founding Fathers" intend the United States to be a Christian Nation? Christianistas would have you think so but was that really the case? If you take a look at the first 150 years, of the colonies, you will find religious intolerance was rife. Protestantism was preferable, Catholicism was not, and Jews were an anathema. In Massachusetts Quakers were beaten, arrested, deported and executed. Yes the man on you favorite oatmeal was the scourge of the colonies. Pennsylvania was founded as a refuge for the persecuted Quakers and Maryland was founded for Catholics. Although Catholics were not safe for long in Maryland. The Puritans burned all of the Catholic churches in Southern Maryland. Actually it was George Washington who promoted tolerance of Catholics to curry favor with the French, as an ally, a predominantly Catholic country.

The words God and Creator are each mentioned only once in the Declaration of Independence. The word God is never mentioned in the Constitution. Isn't strange that if the Founding Fathers wanted this to be a Christian Nation that they would leave God out of the Constitution?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;

It wasn't until the 14th amendment, in 1868, that the Bill of Rights was applied to the States. Until then The States could establish religion and sanction it. The Restoration period, after the Civil War, changed the nature of the Constitution forever.

More about the beliefs of the Founding Fathers tomorrow.